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Saturday, 22 November 2014

The wrong end of the telescope

There’s no accounting
for taste. Christopher Nolan’s
‘Interstellar’ has had some mixed reviews, but I really liked it. A recurring theme among
critics is that the film is over-sentimental, perhaps even ‘schmaltzy’. It certainly
has a big focus on relationships, particularly on the one between Cooper (a star
turn by Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murphy, played variously by
Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn. But just because something connects
on an emotional level doesn’t make it schmaltzy; I get the feeling that some
reviewers are uncomfortable with the film’s emotional clout and they deal with
that discomfort by pretending to look down their noses at it. Or perhaps they
think that a film purporting to have grand ideas about the future of
civilization shouldn’t be slumming it in soap opera territory, getting bogged
down in all that silly emotional stuff.

One of the best things about ‘Interstellar’
is that it beats a drum for the indomitability of
the human spirit. The bedraggled earth of the near future appears to be
stripped of hope, ambition, or any semblance of the pioneering spirit. Cooper rails
against this malaise, believing that humankind is (or was) capable of
greatness: “We
used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars … now we just
look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

When he gets summoned
to meet the teachers at Murphy’s school, we see the contrast between the world
that he’s stuck in and the world he’d rather live in. The teachers point out
the various ways in which his galactically bright daughter is ‘failing’ in her
education; they are particularly concerned about her wasting time on ancient
books that don’t adhere to the current intellectual orthodoxies. In this miserable,
dust-covered future, where the earth has succumbed to blight and has turned its
back on big ideas and big technology, school text books teach that the 1969 moon
landings were faked for propaganda purposes.

As a prissy young teacher,
unencumbered by doubt, lectures Cooper about the ‘excess and wastefulness of
the 20th century’, the look on his face manages to convey all of the
rage, the betrayal, the bewilderment and hurt of a man who still believes
passionately in the infinite possibilities of humankind, who believes that
“we’ve always defined
ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible”.

I detect echoes of
that fictional schoolteacher in the row over Matt Taylor’s ‘sexist’ shirt. The
Rosetta mission scientist Taylor is part of a team that
managed to send a vehicle on a ten-year journey of four billion miles in order
to land on a comet that is hurtling through space at 40,000 mph. You’d think
that might have been enough to impress people, but not everyone was happy. Some people chose to focus on the hideous shirt that he wore to a news conference, deeming the bozo scientist to be guilty of sexism.

The argument, as I
understand it, is that girls might somehow be put off science by the shirt’s subliminal
message (namely, girls are not welcome in the world of science). Really? Does
anyone believe that a bright kid sitting in front of her television, curious and
excited about all of this astonishing stuff going on in space, will see a guy in
a dodgy shirt and think: “I’m going to sign up for a ‘hair, nails and beauty’
course, because that man’s horrible shirt is telling me that science isn't for females"?The notion is not
only patronising rubbish, it’s insulting to that intelligent and curious little
girl (not to mention the women working on the Rosetta mission).

The evidence indicates
that Taylor must be a very clever scientist, but I have no idea what he’s like
as a human being. Given the scale of his achievements, I’d prefer not to judge
him on one unfortunate item of clothing, but our burgeoning offencerati seem
to believe that every aspect of human endeavour, every person doing every
activity in every possible location, regardless of context, should be subject
to the standards by which we’d judge a junior social worker on a ‘diversity
awareness’ training course. The hive mind, alas, is governed by illiberal impulses.
Its puritan obsession with minutiae is often not just about a failure to see
the bigger picture; it’s about a refusal to acknowledge that a bigger picture
exists.

The teacher in
‘Interstellar’ is a fictional character, put in a story to illustrate the idea
of a spirit-crushing poverty of aspiration. I don’t know what the excuse is for the folk
who, instead of looking up to the stars, are worrying about Matt Taylor’s
shirt.

About Me

A few years ago, I promised that I would never start a blog; this is it.
On this blog, I plan to respond to real (or imagined) slights by posting coruscating put-downs of my enemies, competitors and -occasionally- friends. I also plan to maintain the acrimonious simmering of a series of longstanding grudges and petty disputes.
But mainly, the blog will faithfully record a pointless and pedestrian series of idle musings, attempted libels and ill-considered theories about popular culture, sport, politics, music and the meaning of life.
For the last couple of years, I've been writing about an album I'm recording; yes, it's nearly finished.
The views represented on this blog are not necessarily endorsed by the author, unless they are.